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The Summer Rural English Teachers’ Program is an intensive program committed to providing the opportunity for professional development to in-service teachers. The program was started in 2004 and has served rural English teachers in Guizhou, Hebei, and Shanxi thus far. The 2016 summer program site will be in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Normal University. Although most of the participants teach in villages, the training takes place in the city.

Sponsorship of the local Education Department: The local Education Department works with Zigen to provide administrative and financial support for the teacher training program each summer. The Zigen Fund supports the housing and meals for the staff as well as the teaching and office supplies for the program. The local Education Department provides housing and meals for teachers brought in from the countryside and monitors the attendance of all trainees. Provision for transportation expenses would be determined by the Education Department.

The ‍Goals of the Program:

Participants will....

1. learn additional teaching techniques and strategies for language learning based on the text Teach English: A Training Course for Teachers
2. develop activities to supplement the textbooks used in school.
3. enjoy English language learning through communicative-based activities.
4. further develop their English language skills in speaking, listening, reading, and writing.
5. study second language acquisition research that supports language teaching and learning.
6. develop model lessons and present them to the other trainees as public lessons according to the initiative of the Foreign Language Department of the Ministry of Education
7. learn how to train other teachers in interactive methods to make the study of English appealing to students.

Summer 2016

• Judy Manton taught English to adult immigrants in New York City for 32 years. She also taught English to professors at the South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 1980-82. She taught in various other parts of China prior to becoming the director of the Zigen program. She has been a professor of cross-cultural studies at a university in New Jersey for 23 years. Ms. Manton first visited China in 1972 and had the great honor of meeting Premier Zhou En-lai. Her late husband was active in helping China obtain a seat in the United Nations. As his American mother had been born in Fujian and later became a teacher there, he had grown up hearing about her love for China. He founded the China-America Relations Society and initiated some of the first exchanges between China and the United States. Judy Manton has visited China 27 times for a total of over 5 years living in China. She speaks some Chinese.

• BioCynthia S Wiseman, a US Fulbright Scholar in Vietnam in 2015, was a visiting professor at Pham Van Dong University in Quang Ngai City in South Central Vietnam where she worked with university teachers to develop ideas and techniques for implementing a communicative language teaching approach in the classroom. Similarly, in China, as Assistant Director of the Zigen English Teacher Training Program, she has worked with Chinese English teachers from rural areas of China to explore a communicative language teaching approach and develop a variety of communicative practices in the classroom. Dr. Wiseman is currently Associate Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College at City University of New York, where she has been instrumental in developing assessments for reading and writing as well as rubrics for assessing second language writing. She earned her EdD from Teachers College, Columbia University, in Applied Linguistics. Her dissertation Investigating selected facets in measuring second language writing ability using holistic and analytic scoring methods explored evaluation of second language writing.
  
  Cynthia S. Wiseman, EdD, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, 199 Chambers Street, N482, New York, NY 10007, cwiseman@bmcc.cuny.edu
  

Trainees/Teachers:

• Those who participate in our program are recommended by the headmasters of each primary, middle, high school. ETTP is designed to enhance the English language skills and teaching skills of village English teachers. We have no control over which teachers will participate in our program. In the past, there have been teachers who have experience teaching English, but cannot communicate in English because of lack of opportunity to be taught in English. This year I have stressed the desire to have in the program only those who can communicate in English and have potential to train other teachers. But we may have teachers with a low level of aural/oral English. Some of the teachers may have been taught by foreign teachers and thus may speak and understand well.
• In order to make the greatest contribution to the effectiveness of English teaching in your county, we would like to give further training to those experienced teachers whom you have designated to train less proficient teachers. We feel in this way we can make the best use of our skills and resources. We can accommodate 25 primary teachers in one class and 25 middle and high school teachers combined in the other class. All of the teachers should have a high level of English proficiency. All of them should be considered potential teacher trainers. (If we are successful in recruiting another professor, an additional 25 teachers could join the program.)

• The trainees must have pre-arranged for child care in order to commit to regular attendance during the entire program.

• Accommodations: The trainees from the countryside need to be housed in the city according to the arrangements of the education office. Their meals are also the responsibility of the education office. The teaching staff requires housing in an air conditioned hotel with internet access in all of the rooms. Western-style toilets are requested. The Zigen Fund pays for the hotel and meals of the training staff.

• Site: The program is usually held in an education training center or in a school which provides access to computers and a projector in the classrooms, the internet in the office or elsewhere, and a projector and screen in the auditorium. Fans are also provided in the classrooms and usually an air conditioner in the office. Office space is requested for our materials and laptops.

• Daily schedule: The daily schedule is related to the intensity of the summer weather. Morning classes would be held 8:00 - 11:30 and afternoon classes 2:00 - 5:00. Occasionally an English-language film with Chinese subtitles might be shown in the evening, but in that case, families would be invited to attend. No classes would be held on weekends.

• August 1 – Arrive in Shijiazhuang
• August 2-4 – Set up office at Hebei Normal University and arrange classrooms
• August 5 – Meet the teachers for the first time. Give them the placement test and form classes. Have the opening ceremony which introduces the program to them.
• August 8-21 – Teach the classes. Have a closing ceremony and party.
• August 19 - Cynthia leaves.

Course content:

Certificate of completion:

Evaluation: